Subway building fever comes to China

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China is urbanizing faster than any other nation on earth. And one of the best places to measure its progress is underground.

30 meters beneath Guangzhou – the capital of southern China’s Guangdong Province – construction workers are building a new subway line.This far down, temperatures can reach 60 degrees Celsius, as workers soaked in sweat use boring machines to excavate a tunnel.

A worker is working in a subway tunnel./CGTN Photo

“Now we’re working days and nights without any stop. Even when it's raining, we’ll cover the site so the workers could stay on the field. As soon as the rain stops, the work will continue，” said Meng Tao, vice general manager of the construction company.

Up on street level, they’re building a new station called Tianhe Park. It’s as big as ten football fields. When completed, it’ll be the largest metro station in Asia.

According to Meng Tao, building the station required the same amount of concrete as the massive Three Gorges Dam. Since 2015, station construction has been underway for more than three years. Now it’s 90% finished—just waiting for the finishing touches.

The construction of Tianhe Park Station requires the same amount of concrete as the massive Three Gorges Dam, the largest dam on earth./CGTN Photo

The company building this mega project has spared no expenses.

Meng told CGTN that in order to speed up construction, they tried everything they could to keep up with the schedule without considering the cost, like adding more and more workers and increasing investments.

What drove Meng Tao’s company to invest so much capital is the huge potential market.

Just in Guangzhou, there are nearly 400 kilometers of metro lines and the city plans to double it within five years. By the year 2020, China’s total investment in metro lines could be up to four trillion yuan, or over 600 billion US dollars.

1891km